Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @07:59PM
from the star-gazing dept.

First time accepted submitter MCastelaz writes "Researchers at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit foundation located at a former NASA Tracking Station, are preparing to unlock 120 years of images of the night sky. The images are embedded on more than 220,000 astronomical photographic plates and films dating back to 1898 collected from over 40 institutions and observatories in the United States. These plates and films are housed in the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive at PARI. The researchers plan to begin digitizing these collections this year, bringing these fantastic observational works by generations of astronomers who spent more than a million hours at telescopes to the general public and scientists worldwide. The PARI researchers are calling this the Astronomy Legacy Project. The researchers will use an extremely high precision, fast, scanning machine to do the work. To get the project off the ground, they are beginning with a crowdfunding campaign and the funds from that campaign will be used to buy the digitizing machine."

Yes. Required for the stability to scan with the precision and accuracy needed for both astrometry and spectroscopy. You need zero backlash positioners and a rock-solid (pun intended) surface.

Less expensive than the alternatives, such as refitting a PDS 2020G such as was used to generate Space Telescope Science Institute's digitized sky survey ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ).